Leadership and the spiral of inquiry

The important principles in scanning are:  

• involving learners 
• being driven by curiosity 
• ensuring you cover cognitive, cultural, and social-emotional domains.  

Mindsets for scanning 

You must start with the ākonga and what they are saying.  Adults are often convinced they know what’s going on for ākonga, but when we ask questions with a genuine sense of curiosity, there can often be surprises.  

Scanning questions 

1. Can you name two adults in this school who believe you will be a success in life? 
2. What are you learning? What are the big ideas you are learning? What are you learning, and why is it important? 
3. How is it going? Where are you going with your learning? What would you like to tell others about how you’re doing? How do you know how you’re doing? 
4. Where to next? Tell me what the next piece of learning is for you. What do you need to do to get better at this? 

Leadership challenges  

Mindset challenges 

• Helping others to pause and reflect before assuming they know it all and how to fix it. 

Organisational challenges  

• Finding time. This is about setting priorities. What will you stop doing? 
• Ensuring the scanning process is informed by the right expertise and happens in ways that get the real answers – not just what the adults are expecting. 

Scanning: Tools and approaches 

General suggestions  

Use the available data. Make sure you get underneath the data to find out what is going on for those ākonga who have been identified as priority learners. 

• Watch how ākonga interact in a range of settings; this can tell you a lot about social relationships and cultural and emotional connectedness. 
• Survey ākonga about aspects of their cultural, social, intellectual, and emotional engagement. 

Scanning for effective learning environments 

You can scan to analyse how well the current learning environment is serving our ākonga and their learning. The seven principles of learning from the OECD’s work on innovative learning environments provide a good start for this.

The principles are: 

• Learners at the centre. 
• The social nature of learning. 
• Emotions are integral to learning. 
• Recognising individual differences. 
• Stretching all students. 
• Assessment for learning. 
• Building horizontal connections. 

The Nature of Learning: Practitioner guide (PDF). This guide summarises the seven principles of learning. 

See Materials that come with this resource to download Seven principles of learning chart (.doc). 

You can use this chart to scan what is going on at your kura, using the seven principles: 

Scanning with written surveys 

Surveys can be a helpful way to get learners’ perspectives. One example is Me and My School (NZCER) for students in year 4 to 10. It asks students for their responses to questions regarding three aspects of engagement: affective, behavioural, and cognitive. 

After receiving the results, follow up with ākonga to find out why they answered in the way they did and about the social, emotional, and intellectual beliefs that sit beneath their responses. This provides a valuable starting point for identifying your starting point for improvement.    

Scanning Pacific students’ experiences in literacy learning 

In her doctoral thesis, Rae Si'ilata, identified six dimensions of effective practice that together create the Va‘atele model. These help accelerate literacy learning for Pacific learners. Each dimension is associated with two indicators. Together, they alert us to the need to monitor aspects of Pacific learners’ experiences, such as the following:  

• Learners’ and families’ aspirations, knowledge, and values. 
• Learners’ levels of English language and English literacy.
• The extent to which in-school relationships build learners’ agency. 
• Learners’ home languages and cultural funds of knowledge and the extent to which they are helped to make meaningful connections between these funds of cultural knowledge and their experiences with texts. 
• The extent to which Pacific learners are helped to transfer knowledge, languages, and literacies from one context to another. 
• The extent to which teachers collaborate with Pacific families in identifying student learning needs and valued outcomes. 
• The extent to which reciprocal relationships are developed with Pacific families.

These dimensions could be applied to a variety of contexts to explore connections to learning through a cultural lens. 

Scanning for learners’ metacognition 

Ask questions to gain information about students’ metacognitive understanding. Metacognition includes social-emotional and cultural learning, so make sure you probe these areas, as well as their cognition: 

• Do you know what success in this task looks like? [name task] 
• Why are you doing this task? 
• Who are you doing this task for? 
• How does this task connect to your culture and experiences? 

See Materials that come with this resource to download Four key questions that matter (.pdf)

Stories from the field 

Scanning for cultural responsiveness 

A school in Tai Tokerau was working to be more culturally responsive to its high percentage of Māori learners and their whānau and reviewed all their documentation from a cultural and inclusive lens. They asked their Māori ākonga and whānau how they thought the school viewed them. They engaged a professional development provider with deep knowledge in the area. This mahi helped to surface many of the cultural assumptions embedded in the policy documents and the school organisation. 

Scanning when professional development wasn’t making a difference. 

An Australian school had engaged in high-quality professional development and achieved great things for school climate and culture, but the low student academic outcomes hadn’t changed. In this video, they talk about how they changed things around by engaging in the spiral of inquiry.   

Leaders, teachers, and ākonga engage in focusing to develop a deeper understanding of the situation and to agree on an area to work on together. The focusing phase may require further in-depth investigation of what is going on for specific groups of learners. It may also involve reaching out to whānau, mana whenua, and others in the community for their perspectives. 

Mindsets for focusing  

Less equals more. Focused learning leads to improvement. If you try to do too many new things, then less change and improvement will happen. The goal is ‘focused and deep’ rather than ‘scattered and superficial’. Getting the ‘grain size’ right means the following: 

• The focus is manageable. No one feels overwhelmed. For example, a focus on place value rather than mathematics as a whole. 
• The focus has high leverage. It is not too trivial. It really will make a difference. For example, a focus on intellectual engagement. 
• A critical mass of staff believes that if they put in the effort, it will be worth it. 
• You work on just one challenge at a time and are then deliberate about transferring what you have learned from this as you turn to address new and related challenges. Don’t move on until you have cracked it. 

Leadership challenges  

Mindset challenges 

• Getting sufficient commitment to a common focus. This is easier when connected to the scanning process.  

Organisational challenges 

• Setting goals and targets that represent equitable outcomes that reduce disparity for all ākonga. 
• Integrating goals and targets into your annual plans. If your inquiry focus is to make a real difference, it must be addressed and resourced as part of your core business.  

Tools and approaches  

General suggestions 

• Identify a focus that everyone can commit to.  
• Sometimes, you can get greater leverage by combining foci. 
• Look ahead to the checking phase to plan how you will gather sufficient data to answer the question, “Have we made enough of a difference?” 

Prepare evidence 

Make sure the evidence is specific, disaggregated by groups, and that you know exactly which ākonga will be prioritised in your focused efforts. This evidence is your baseline. Then develop your goals and targets. 

Motivating goals and targets 

Goals and targets can be defined in different ways, but usually: 

• goals have broad aims (for example, “Improve student engagement and achievement in x”) 
• targets are more specific, and time-bound (for example, “Move every student at least two sub-levels in x, by x time, with students below level x moving three sub-levels”).  

You can use ‘SMART’ as a reminder: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. 

A range of goals: 

• Find a balance between goals and targets that address curriculum learning and those that address cultural, social, and emotional facets of learning. 
• Be ambitious in all these areas. Things can change quickly with the right focus and strategies to address them.  

Some suggestions and cautions: 

• Involve learners in setting personal and school-wide goals and targets. 
• While effective responsive pedagogy is a requisite for lifting achievement, it’s important to make your goals and targets about what everyone hopes for the learners – not about what the adults will be doing. 
• Measure what you treasure; don’t just treasure what you can easily measure. 
• Be very aware of possible adverse effects. For example, goals and targets that focus on a percentage of students achieving a particular level (for example, “85% of students reach level x”) can be inequitable and unfair to those who will struggle to achieve the level and to those who can achieve it easily. Shifting the whole profile with an emphasis on acceleration for those not doing so well is much fairer for everyone. 

Stories from the field  

Getting to a single focus  

A Waikato school had many foci. Some were reflected in their annual plan, but some of their real priorities weren’t. For example, they: 

• wanted to be more culturally responsive to their local iwi and were engaging whānau in storying their local history, with each student involved in developing a school-wide journal 
• had literacy goals around writing narrative text 
• were creating modern learning environments where learners took more responsibility and ownership for their learning. 

All these foci involved staff in professional development. 

The principal realised there was a problem when he suggested they take up a new offer of professional development in maths. His suggestion was met by silence in the staff room. So, they all took a deep breath and revisited their scanning data. All foci still seemed important. 

• Their Māori students were less engaged than others and most could not name two adults at school who believed they could be a success in life.  
• asTTle results in narrative were lower than in recount (the only purposes assessed). 
• Learners were vague about their learning goals and where to next. 

When working through these options, staff realised that they were not doing their learners or themselves any favours by focusing separately on cultural responsiveness, narrative writing, and students taking greater responsibility for their learning. In reality, these foci could be combined into a school-wide focus for the year – writing narrative by bringing historical storying with whānau into the centre and integrating modern learning practices. They worked out which aspects of the scanning data they would use to set goals and targets. 

Leaders, teachers, and ākonga engage in developing hunches to uncover and test beliefs about what is leading to the situation and to focus on what they can do about it. You could also draw on whānau, mana whenua, and others in the community to share their thoughts and ideas. 

Mindsets for developing a hunch 

‘Hunches’ are ideas or assumptions about what is leading to the situation that you want to change. Express them in ways that can be tested to see if they are leading to the situation. Don’t play the blame game and decide that things are as they are because of what others are doing or not doing. Hunches are about how we are individually and collectively contributing to the situation. 

Leadership challenges 

• Building a culture where teachers feel safe to identify what it is they do not know and the kind of support that will help them to learn it.  
• The stance that the spiral of inquiry involves “everyone including me” means thinking about how you may be contributing to maintaining the situation from which you wish to move.  

Tools and approaches  

General suggestions 

• Make space for diverse points of view to open alternative thinking. 
• Reframe issues to focus on things that educators can influence and improve. 
• Invite students, whānau, mana whenua, and the community to give their views. 

Developing and testing hunches about your leadership 

Developing and testing hunches about your leadership is as important as testing hunches about what is happening in the teaching and learning space. 

See Materials that come with this resource to download Testing hunches about leadership (.doc). 

Developing and testing hunches about teacher knowledge and skills 

When teachers consider the scanning and focusing data, they usually come to realise that they need to learn something new in order to make a difference. In a risk-taking culture, teachers will readily identify the kind of support that will help them to learn it. 

Developing hunches with learners 

Take the analysis of the assessment results to the learners who completed the assessment. Ask them why some results are high, and some are low. Ask how you can help them to move from low to high.  

Developing a theory for improvement 

A theory for improvement is a set of linked ideas about how to improve some aspect of what is happening in your kura for your ākonga. This is often stated as a goal. It is useful to map agreed-upon strategies to ensure everyone is on the same page and knows who has to do what and by when, and how progress will be checked. Remember it is important to include the learners in developing your theory. 

See Materials that come with this resource to download Developing a theory for improvement (.doc). 

Stories from the field 

Testing hunches using learning maps 

Learner agency is about students having ownership and control over their learning. Finding out the ownership they feel they have in what and how they learn gives an insight into learner agency. Do teachers always set tasks? Do learners feel they have a choice about who they learn with? 

Asking learners to draw learning maps about who or what helps them with their learning can be revealing. Brian Annan and Mary Wootton developed this idea about learning maps. 

Rata Street School student – Learning and Change Networks on YouTube 

In this video a student at Rata Street School completes a self-review of his learning arrangements. He set up a self-recording to present his learning maps, shared it with his dad for review, then created a recording based on his dad’s feedback.  

Testing five-year-olds’ skills 

A large South Auckland primary school was surprised when staff tested their hunch that students’ poor reading levels in year three were the result of students “coming to school with no skills”. 

Staffroom talk often included stories about children arriving at school completely unprepared for learning. The school did not assess their learners on arrival because staff thought it was a waste of time. However, they now decided to test their hunch by doing so. 

Staff developed a list of 25 skills they believed were important for students beginning a formal school programme. They estimated that, on average, the children would have about five to seven of the listed skills. One teacher gave a much higher estimate. 

What they found after the testing was that the average was much higher – around 20 of the skills. They also noticed that the learners in the class of the teacher who gave the higher estimate made greater progress over the first year. So, they bravely re-assessed their hunch and decided that maybe a greater problem was that they were not recognising and using the skills and resources the learners brought with them on arrival. 

Interpreting the demands of questions  

Staff at a secondary school believed that senior students’ low achievement was a result of their inability to read test and examination questions. They had intended to introduce a reading programme for those students not achieving, but instead decided to ask students representing a range of achievement levels to read samples of questions across different areas of the curriculum. 

They found the students showed little difference in their ability to decode the questions. The problem was with their ability to interpret what the question was asking them to do (for example, ‘compare and contrast’, ‘analyse’, or ‘describe’). 

There is learning in all phases of the spiral. This phase is the careful design of the professional learning needed to take action in the next phase. It involves deciding what to learn and how to learn it. 

Mindsets for new learning 

Part of our identity as professionals is the desire to seek opportunities to learn. The concept of ‘growth mindsets’ applies as much to teachers and leaders as it does to young people. Adaptive experts constantly ask themselves whether they are working effectively to: 

• promote the learning of each learner for whom they have responsibility 
• seek information and feedback on their efforts to maximise learning 
• gather evidence about whether they are making enough of a difference 

Learning needs to be directly relevant to what is happening for learners at that time. It also needs to be deeply informed by research about what makes a difference so that teachers and leaders understand why new practices are better and what they would look like in their context. 

Ignoring the current research evidence on what makes a difference to learners and to learning is the educational equivalent of malpractice. -(Timperley, Kaser & Halbert, 2014, p.15)  

Leadership challenges 

Mindset challenges 

New learning is about learning to change practice and improve outcomes for targeted learners. It is deliberate. Don’t just talk about the change you want to create, implement it. Walk the talk.  

Organisational challenges 

• Thinking of new ways to maximise professional learning time. 
• Accessing the expertise that will support everyone to develop new knowledge and deepen their skills. Don’t forget to value your internal experts. 

Tools and approaches  

General suggestions 

• Design systems and processes that encourage teachers to collaborate and explore why a new strategy might work. Then try it out, review it with others, and modify it to try again. 
• Ensure learning stays connected to the purpose and is not just about strategies. 
• Acknowledge the need for time. Research indicates one year is a minimum; two years is better; and three years of intensive, engaged effort moves towards transformed learning environments. 

Collaborative analysis of student work 

Collaborative analysis of student work is a good way to promote professional learning. Here is one way to organise this activity to promote professional learning:  

See Materials that come with this resource to download  Professional learning communities - Protocols for collaborative analysis of student work (.doc).

Professional conversations 

It is essential to have high-quality professional learning conversations. Helen Timperley outlines five factors that enable such conversations: resources, relationships, purpose, knowledge, and culture.   

Read: Professional Conversations and  Improvement-focused Feedback (Timperley, 2015) 

Watch: Enablers for effective professional conversations  (Timperley, 2015) Helen Timperley, Professor of Education at the University of Auckland, undertook a literature review examining the research on professional conversations in schools. In this video, Helen discusses the enablers and their impact on professional conversations. 

Story from the field 

Creating professional learning opportunities 

An Australian primary school had been working with the spiral of inquiry for over a year. However, they did not make much progress until they narrowed their focus and got serious about promoting professional learning opportunities for their staff.  

Staff meeting structure 

We now start staff meetings with 10 minutes of professional reading or sharing – just to open up what we’re doing more. Then, the main focus is a workshop where we do the work, there and then, together, to get a common understanding. At the end of each meeting, we commit to action. 

Leader of learning 

We created a role to oversee teaching and learning and develop consistent across-school practice. 

PD at school 

Instead of people going out to PD events, we’ve brought the experts in to us. We started at the beginning of the year at the big-picture level. This term, we brought it down to a specific focus. From that, we looked at and talked about where it’s found in the curriculum.  

Collaborating with another school 

We created the opportunity for the teachers to learn collaboratively with another school to benchmark learners’ writing samples 

Student voice and effective teacher practice – Teacher magazine, May 2016. ACER 

Engaging student voice in teachers’ inquiries – Martyn Davison, Claire Sinnema, Alison Taylor, and Vaughan Mitchell. Set 2016: no. 1. NZCER 

Taking action is a team activity: teachers work collaboratively to turn new learning into new practices. It requires dialogue, observation, reflection, and opportunities to try and try again. It always involves students, and often, it involves meaningful engagement with whānau, mana whenua, and others in the community. 

Mindsets for taking action 

We must do things differently if there are to be different outcomes for ākonga. This means taking risks and continually checking to see if those risks are paying off. Taking action is a way to deepen learning to make enough of a difference. It is informed by evidence, focused, and team led. 

Leadership challenges 

Mindset challenges 

• Taking action involves leaders as much as teachers. 
• Ensuring everyone realises that professional learning is about doing things differently. Talking about taking action is not the same as taking action. 
• Involving ākonga in deciding whether the action taken is effective in helping them to learn. 
• Taking no action isn’t an option. 

Organisational challenges  

• Providing time and opportunities to ensure the action taken is consistent with the intended changes and is making a difference for learners. 
• Providing time and opportunities to review the effectiveness of the action. 

Tools and approaches  

General suggestions  

• Sustain momentum by setting timeframes of about two to four weeks for each set of actions. At the end of each period, have participants report on progress. 
• Establish a process for team support and reflection. 
• Focus observations specifically on the new practice. 

Using video to become metacognitive about taking action  

Like ākonga, teachers and leaders benefit from developing their metacognition.   

See Materials that come with this resource to download Developing metacognition through video analysis of practice (.doc).

Feedback through video analysis  

Videos can be a powerful tool for analysing changes in practices and promoting learning. Leaders can use video to promote learning by: 

• co-constructing clear professional learning goals based on the video evidence 
• inquiring into teachers’ thinking and exploring why particular choices or decisions were made 
• providing the teacher with feedback and inviting the teacher to discuss the feedback. 
• co-constructing possibilities for new practice. 

Feedback through practice analysis conversations and observations 

Practice analysis conversations occur in four phases: 

1. Establish learning goals and co-construct criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of practice before the observation. 
2. Observe the lesson, using the criteria as a reference. 
3. Analyse relevant parts of the lesson using the criteria. 
4. Co-construct new ideas for practice based on the analysis. 

Find out more: Professional Conversations and Improvement-focused Feedback – Timperley (2015)  

Story from the field 

Organising for action 

An Australian school had begun the taking action phase but realised they had the wrong focus and were having difficulty getting staff commitment. They re-focused. When they were ready to take action with this new focus, they began by attending to some important issues: 

• weekly team planning for action 
• developing collaborative processes to decide the action they would take in classrooms and determine how they would check if things were changing. 

The evidence you identified and used in the earlier phases of the spiral is the basis for checking. Have your changes in practice led to the overall improvement you were aiming for? Do people across your school community agree? 

Mindsets for checking 

The effectiveness of practice is defined by how well ākonga are learning, not by what the practice looks like. If you find you haven’t made enough of a difference, be prepared to re-focus and try again with a new approach. The whole spiral is about making enough of a difference for all learners to progress through their schooling experience with dignity, purpose, and options and for them to leave school more curious than when they arrived (Timperley, Kaser, & Halbert, 2014). Make sure your checking attends to at least some of these attributes. 

Leadership challenges 

Mindset challenges 

• When checking reveals variability in learner outcomes, this becomes a leadership challenge. 
• Every action needs to be tested against the question, “Are we (collectively) making enough of a difference?” 
• Learners need to be involved in the checking process. 

Organisational challenges 

• Planning opportunities for both informal and formal checking is essential. 
• Finding the appropriate tools for checking. 

General suggestions 

• Check-in frequently and do so collectively, as a team. 
• Involve learners and their whānau in the checking process. 

Story from the field  

Going deeper  

A school in Australia re-focused after finding out they hadn’t reached their targets. In this video, they talk about how they re-scanned and re-focused to go deeper. 

The inquiry framework is a spiral – that means one thing leads to another and doesn’t come to a stop at checking. 

What’s next? 

When you have moved through the checking phase and if you have decided you want to keep going, think about what it is you want to continue. Is it: 

• a continuation of your selected focus 
• an inquiry mindset and process to approach the next challenge 
• embedding and developing new teaching and leadership practices 
• continuing to improve social-emotional, cultural, and intellectual outcomes for learners. 

Be explicit, and don’t assume your learners, colleagues, and community agree. 

Other models of inquiry  

Here are some alternative models of inquiry that you could explore:  

• Inquiry and knowledge building cycle

Pakuranga College: Organising for professional learning  

Pakuranga College principal Mike Williams describes the strategy, structures, and processes the school is using to embed professional learning in teacher daily practice. 

Strategy 

Professional learning has to: 

• include all staff 
• be authentic and reflect school values and culture 
• be based on the science and evidence about how people learn. 

There are three important ways we have done this: 

• We constantly communicate our key beliefs and vision for teachers and teaching. 
• We deliberately contextualised professional learning in individual teacher daily practice. 
• We have prioritised the inclusion of authentic student voice in the inquiry process. 

We have identified four teacher outcomes: 

• increased knowledge of how people learn 
• a greater variety of pedagogical tools in our teacher toolkit 
• increased self-awareness of our values and assumptions and how they drive classroom actions  
• deeper reflective capacity and inquiry thinking skills – our ability to stand back and critically analyse the effect of our teaching on student learning. 

I have three leadership tasks: 

• Put the structures and resources in place for effective professional learning to happen. The critical part of this, the hardest part, is to build a learning culture. 
• Keep the big goal and the core principles in focus – the reason we are doing this work is to achieve better outcomes for students through teachers continually moving forward and building capability. 
• Remain committed and do not allow us to get side-tracked, but be flexible. Like teaching, it is a complex process, and we know the approach will change. 

The leadership actions I take:  

• I ensure there is designated time for professional learning and inquiry. 
• I distribute the leadership of teacher learning to as many teachers as possible. 
• I focus on developing a coherent school-wide culture. 
• I walk the talk. 

The PLD structures that we use: 

• Professional learning groups  
• Critical friend groups 
• Teachers coaching teachers 
• School-wide themes 

Processes 

Inquiry focus: We emphasise that inquiries must be: 

• purposeful and located in daily practice – what students in my class need to know and do 
• shared or individual 
• focused on a class or a particular group of students 
• informed by analysis of data and evidence of student learning, qualitative and quantitative. 

Student involvement: All teachers are required to use student voice in their inquiry.  

Teaching observations: As part of the inquiry process, each teacher is expected to observe a critical friend and to be observed themselves. We ask teachers to have pre- and post-observation conversations. We use a set of templates to guide the observations and prompt critical thinking. 

See Materials that come with this resource to download:

• Lesson observation form  (.doc).
• Inquiry into practice - peer critique guide (.doc)
• Inquiry into practice - self-assessment  (.doc)

Critical reflection: We have strategies in place to help people to think deeply about their practice and which students are advantaged and disadvantaged by their actions.  

Public presentations of inquiry: Twice a year, every teacher makes a 15-minute presentation to their colleagues in cross-curricular or faculty groups. They share what they did in their inquiry, why, and what students have said. All presentations follow a set of questions. 

See Materials that come with this resource to download Inquiry – teacher presentations (.doc).

Teacher and student shared presentations of inquiry: Each year, groups of teachers and their students present to cross-curricular groups of teachers. The students confidently talk about what their teacher was doing that was helping them with their learning, and the teacher talks about how the student voice helped them modify practice to create more effective learning activities. 

Inquiry at Albany Senior High School 

All staff engage in rigorous professional inquiry. The process has developed over several years, but the purpose has been the same - to ensure academic success for everyone. The process demands a high degree of challenging collaboration, data literacy, and research to inform their decisions, as they learn about students and the effectiveness of their teaching. 

Framing ideas 

Five key ideas underpin the process for professional inquiry: 

• Agentic: teachers are in charge of their learning, and it fits with the needs of their students. 
• Collaborative: In ways that challenge and critique teachers’ theories and share professional knowledge with cross-curricular teams, departmental teams, and students. 
• Embedded: In the sense that it is an integral part of their teaching practice. 
• Timely: So it makes a difference to the learning of the students in front of them. 
• Iterative: In the sense that it informs future planning and professional learning journeys. 

Professional inquiry process 

Scanning and focusing: ASHS prefers the term ‘analysing’ to ‘scanning’, as teachers examine the student data from each of their classes. Identifying these students is the starting point, as teachers ask themselves: 

• Where is the underachievement? 
• Who are the actual students? (Name them.) 
• What information do we have on them, including data that can be exported from SMS? 
• How did the students perform in this subject or similar subjects last year? 

By asking these questions, teachers identify the crisis they will focus on and the data they have used. They deliberately call it a crisis because any under-performance from a student’s perspective is a crisis and needs to be treated with urgency. 

Developing a hunch: ASHS prefers to call this phase of the spiral ‘developing your hypothesis’. We do this to capture the systematic, evidence-based nature of the process used. Teachers are encouraged to seek alternative theories by asking the students what is going on for them and asking their colleagues and team leaders. The idea behind this process is to promote ‘double-loop learning’. This kind of learning requires the staff to question their underlying assumptions and beliefs about particular students and the impact of their interactions with them. 

New learning and taking action: Teachers are provided with a rich range of resources to help them identify what they need to learn to improve achievement for their students of focus. These resources take the form of research, mentoring, and conversations with leaders and colleagues.  

Checking: Staff identify how they will measure changes in the learning outcomes for their students. They are encouraged to use a range of evidence to answer the question, “What happened for the students of focus as a result of changing our practice?”  

Implications: Deep inquiry into what is happening for one student, or a group of students, gives insights into how to change things for others. Teachers consider what sustained changes they will take into their future practice and how the learning might impact their next inquiry and professional learning. 

A school culture of professional learning 

Each teacher’s inquiry is focused on their students, but the process is highly collaborative. Teachers discuss and critique each phase of the inquiry with their colleagues and mentors. Teachers present the process and findings of their inquiries to each other and their leaders. The collaborative inquiry culture extends to the students of focus, as they are consulted throughout the process about their beliefs and what is working, or not, for them. Together, these processes build a school-wide culture of collaborative professional learning.